Professional anti-money laundering investigator, amateur bridge nut living in the Portland, OR metropolitan area. I don't play as much as I would like to, and that probably isn't going to change soon. I am married to a wonderfully supportive non-bridge player, and now have two little boys: Teddy, who was born April 2017, and TJ, who was born August 2019, but I hope to remain active in playing bridge while I balance my new family life.

Michael Rosenberg is one of my bridge idols, and I was scheduled to play a national event with him. Unfortunately, we hadn't talked over a card. As is my wont in those situations, I arrived 40 minutes early for the event and had two convention cards ready to fill in. Another 20 minutes passed before I saw Michael, as he sauntered in, occasionally stopping for a quick word, before meeting me at the table - I wasn't worried yet, but I was hurried; I'd already filled in some pro-forma stuff that I assumed he would be ok with, like 2/1, 15-17 NT, etc.

Michael greeted me, and I handed him the card I'd started. He frowned, then looked at me and told me "We're going to play precision", and started erasing the stuff I had already put in. I assumed that he had been talking to someone and discovered I played a big club in my primary partnership, but what we play is very different than standard precision or common variants, and I tried to communicate that to Michael. "Nonsense, it will be easy" and he started going over the card with a 14-16 NT and semi-forcing NT.

The event was starting soon, and we hadn't gotten around to a precision 2♦ opening which I've never played before, or what we do over interference, or our basic responses to 1♣ openings - heck, we haven't even discussed carding or our keycard agreements. I'm starting to panic as Michael is filling in our card - what a waste of a great opportunity to play with one of the best to play the game, and now we're playing a system I'm unfamiliar with and which requires discussions that we haven't had to play correctly....

At that point I wake up, find my non-bridge playing wife awake next to me, and start telling her about this dream I had. I'm still trying to figure out if it qualified for a nightmare.

This contains content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.

Spam

This is effectively an advertisement with no disclosure. It is not useful or relevant to the current conversation.

Other (additional description required)

This requires general moderator attention based on the Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, or for another reason not listed above.

Select a reason and click "Flag Post" to flag this for review. You may provide an optional (required if choosing other) description of why you find this objectionable. You may also wish to send a private message to to request him or her to edit or remove the .